


The Case of the Gunned-Down Gumshoe

by Tiriel



Category: Veronica Mars (TV), iZombie (TV)
Genre: Case Fic, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 21:49:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5471915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiriel/pseuds/Tiriel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Liv investigates the death of a private investigator who used to live in Neptune, California, with help from an out-of-town guest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Case of the Gunned-Down Gumshoe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kouredios](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kouredios/gifts).



And then she walked in. Blonde, a little over five feet tall, with eyes that drilled through me like a laser for just a moment before she covered it up with a winning smile. “Veronica Mars. Just came up from the Neptune Sheriff’s Department to take a look at this case.” 

I saw a flash of her, several years younger, answering a desk phone with a businesslike “Mars Investigations” while a balding middle-aged man thumped me on the shoulder warmly. “She got her P.I. license,” he said softly, pride evident in his voice. 

“You’re slicker than a mountain highway in a snowstorm, aren’t you, young lady? By ‘from the Neptune Sheriff’s Department’ I assume you mean that was your last stop before the airport? You and your father already turned up in the investigation as associates of the deceased.”

You’re probably wondering how we got here, so let’s rewind 24 hours. I was minding my own business like any upstanding zombie citizen would, performing a routine examination on a corpse and listening to Ravi rattle on about a new video game.

“Now let me tell you why _Moondust Lace 5_ is clearly superior to _Moondust Lace 4_ , a pale imitation of the first _Moondust Lace_ that wasn’t even produced by the original Japanese studio,“ he said. “Thank goodness they were able to get the rights back.”

“Let’s put a pin in that - Clive is calling. Probably needs a psychic consult.” Sure enough, I was right. Mickey Chandler, 52 years of age, a private investigator originally from North Carolina by way of Southern California, had been shot in the chest while sitting behind the desk in his office. The place looked like it was out of an old film noir, with the name on the glass door and a vintage wood desk that would probably be permanently bloodstained. I couldn’t pick up any “psychic visions” on the scene, of course, but once we got Mickey’s body back to the morgue that was a solvable problem. 

A nice, hot plate full of nachos with zesty brain salsa à la Chandler later, here we were. Me in my lab coat, working over the corpse of another poor soul the jagged teeth of the city had worn down, chewed up, and spat out, and her standing in my doorway staring at me in a way that made me wonder if my internal monologue had turned external. 

“‘Young lady?’ It looks to me like we’re about the same age,” she said, tilting her head at me. 

“Figure of speech. You’ll want to talk to Detective Babineaux, he’s assigned to the case. This isn’t really a place for civilians.”

“I’ve seen worse,” she said with a twitch of her mouth that made me believe her. “I already spoke to the good detective, and while he was exceedingly polite he wasn’t all that helpful. I was hoping you could share your findings. Maybe I could buy you a cup of decent coffee? Something better than the reheated sludge they usually have around a police department?”

“This is Seattle, not SoCal. We don’t do reheated sludge, not even here at the cop shop. I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”

She gave me an evaluative look. “Probably won’t help if I play the ‘he was a really good friend of my family and a stand-up guy’ card, will it?”

“Nope, sorry. I assume you left your contact information with Detective Babineaux?”

She nodded.

“He is crackerjack at his job. We’ll call you when we find the killer.”

* * *

Clive and I headed out into the cold, damp city to question suspects. I was riding private investigator brain like an old pro at the rodeo. Our first stop was the home of Mickey Chandler’s girlfriend, Rhonda. Just as Clive reached up to knock, the door opened and Veronica Mars emerged. 

She smiled at us, bright as the sun peeking through a cloudbreak. “A little unusual for an M.E. to go along when you’re questioning suspects, isn’t it, Detective Babineaux?” 

“A little unusual for an out-of-town P.I. to question suspects in an active police investigation, isn’t it, Ms. Mars?”

“Oh, this? I wasn’t questioning a suspect, I was just paying my condolences. Wouldn’t dream of interfering with your investigation.”

She said it like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. “Of course not,” I grumbled, “you’re innocent as a newborn lamb in a green meadow.”

“You know it,” she said, and walked jauntily to her rental car. “She didn’t do it, by the way.”

She was right, of course. Rhonda Hayworth was a tall redhead with curves in all the right places, somewhere near her mid-50s and still stunning, even though her eyes were red from crying. The kind of woman a man might kill for, but not the kind who’d take advantage of it, and certainly not the kind who’d kill. I blinked and briefly saw her in Mickey’s memory, brow knitted in concern. “Be careful,” she said, “I worry about you when you take a case like this.”

“A case like what?” I blurted, interrupting Clive’s usual speech about how any information she could provide would be of help to us in finding the killer. “I mean, Ms. Hayworth, can you please tell us what kind of cases Mickey was working on? Anything that might be dangerous?” 

“I’m not sure,” she said, “I always worried when he took on infidelity cases, just because emotions run so high on those, but he hadn’t mentioned anything lately. His files would all be at the office.”

“His filing system was a little… unconventional,” Clive said. “Can you shed any light on where we might start to look?”

She smiled fondly. “The case names. He always did have a flair for the dramatic. He even used to call the day we met The Case of the Red-Headed Stranger.”

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said, “I can tell he loved you very much.” Actually, I could feel it, tears welling up inside me and pushing at my eyes like Old Faithful about to blow.

“He did,” she said. “You’ll want the top left-hand desk drawer, Detective. He always kept his current files there, with his camera.”

We thanked her for her time and went back to the office, which was still sealed up with crime scene tape. Sure enough, the current files were in the desk drawer she’d described.

“No camera,” Clive said. 

“That’s probably not a coincidence. Let’s see what we’ve got in the files.”

* * *

Two insurance scammers (The Case of the Fraudulent Femur Fracture and The Case of the Imaginary Injury), a child support dodger (The Case of the Deadbeat Dickhead, not one of Mickey’s most creative moments but reasonably accurate based on our interview), and three “chance encounters” later, Clive finally said, “Tell you what, Ms. Mars, since we keep running into you, why don’t you just ride with us to the next stop?”

“The Case of the Cheating Heart at the Chocolate Festival?”

“Exactly.”

“Mickey really was a stand-up guy, you know,” Veronica said once we were settled in the car. “He helped my father out on a tough case back in the day, and they kept in touch even after he moved up here. He deserved better.” 

“Seems like he was a good egg,” I said.

“He was. Had this thing for inspirational clichés, too - stay in the game, fight the good fight, keep your chin up, don’t let the bastards get you down, that kind of thing. Would have seemed goofy on most people, but he pulled it off, along with the whole case-naming thing. If I did it people would probably just compare me to Nancy Drew.”

“We’ll get justice for him, Veronica, I promise,” I said.

She nodded. “Yeah, we will.”

* * *

Johnny Block had been caught cheating on his wife, noted local chocolatier Louisa Block, and was going to lose his share of the business thanks to a strong pre-nup. Clearly Louisa was smarter than a new suit of church clothes. “That son of a bitch,” he said when Clive asked him about Mickey, “is lucky someone else got to him first. He took pictures of an innocent moment between friends and told my wife I was cheating.” 

His anger triggered a flash from Mickey’s memory. Looking through a camera lens, I saw Johnny Block and a dark-haired woman walking out of a motel room, holding hands. The sign said Four Pines, even though there weren’t any trees anywhere to be seen. Block must have noticed Mickey, because the next thing he did was charge at Mickey’s car, shouting obscenities. Mickey rolled up the window and hit the gas, speeding away from the curb while Johnny waved his arms and shouted and two men in the parking lot stared at the whole exchange. Clive must have heard me gasp, because he gave me an inquiring look. I nodded. 

“Let’s continue this conversation down at the station,” Clive said.

* * *

We let Veronica stand behind the one-way mirror, figuring she’d sweet-talk her way into the room anyway if we didn’t. Clive and I grilled the suspect like a ten-dollar steak. Johnny maintained his innocence.

“I didn’t kill the guy, I swear.”

“And I suppose you didn’t steal his camera, either?” I said.

“Steal his— no, of course not. Look, when did this all happen?”

“Yesterday morning, around 10 a.m.,” Clive said.

“I have an alibi,” Johnny said.

“Which is?”

Johnny crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, shaking his head.

“Then I guess we charge you with Mickey’s murder.”

Johnny stared back at us for a moment, then leaned forward and hit the table with a fist. “Fine, fine. I was with my girlfriend. At the Four Pines Motel.”

“And she’ll verify this for us?”

“Yes.”

She did, and so did the motel clerk, who despite a stated policy of forgetting the faces of anyone who paid cash crumbled like a muddy hillside in a flash flood when Veronica Mars casually pointed out several fire code violations she’d noted on our way in. We let Johnny go. He’d been the last of Mickey’s active cases, and our last lead unless the camera turned up.

Clive asked, “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about Mickey’s missing camera, would you, Veronica?”

She seemed genuinely surprised. “No, of course not.”

“So if I re-checked his desk drawer for fingerprints I wouldn’t find yours?”

“I know better than to leave prints at a crime scene,” she said, “and I haven’t seen his camera. Did you check the digital backup?”

“I thought he was a strictly old-school kind of guy,” I said. “the type who’d only let go of real film if they stopped making it.”

“He was, usually, but my dad and I talked him into a digital backup system not long before he moved up here. I had a friend of mine help him out with it as a tech consultant. If we go to his office I can find it.”

True to her word, it only took her a few minutes to locate a hidden USB port in the desk drawer where the camera had been stored, which linked to a small hard drive attached to the bottom of the desk. Whoever had stolen the camera clearly hadn’t known about it. The recent photos were all from Johnny Block’s tryst at the Four Pines.

“But we already know it wasn’t Johnny,” Clive said.

I stared at the photos of the motel parking lot. Something familiar, something…

An empty donut box on the seat next to me, a cup of coffee in my hand grown colder than Puget Sound in January. Stiff muscles from sitting in the car for so long. Johnny Block either had impressive stamina or needed to get himself a prescription for some little blue pills. A white van pulled into the parking lot, backing up to one of the rooms on the first floor at the end of the building. Two men got out and started unloading unmarked crates from the back of the van into the room. “That’s the third time they’ve been here today,” Mickey/I muttered. I raised the camera.

“Keep scrolling,” I said. We’re looking for pictures of a white van.”

* * *

Mickey had gotten a good enough shot of the two men to identify them in the police database. He had stumbled onto a smuggling operation while staking out Johnny Block and his girlfriend. They both had records, and while Clive and the rest of the Seattle P.D. worked on tracking them down through known associates, the rest of us had nothing to do but wait. I left Veronica and Ravi arguing about which was the best Alfred Hitchcock film, and stole away to make a quiet phone call. 

“Shady Plots,” Blaine answered, in his most respectable tone of voice, which still managed to make him sound like the crookedest used car salesman this side of the Rockies, at least to my slightly biased ear.

I cut right to the chase. “Do you have anything to do with the smuggling operation at the Four Pines Motel?”

“If it isn’t my favorite brain-eating medical examiner. The only brain-eating medical examiner I know, anyway. So far. Has your rat-loving friend made progress in his research?”

“That’s not why I’m calling. I’m asking if the smuggling operation at the Four Pines Motel is one of yours. If it is, you’d better clean it up faster than a thoroughbred at the Derby, unless you want zombies to be front page of the Seattle Times tomorrow.”

“You’re concerned, how sweet. No, the Four Pines isn’t anything to do with me. I wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near that rathole. Or undead. Or even alive. Thanks for the call, though.” 

He hung up. I sighed and went back to the morgue. 

“I would argue,” Ravi was saying, “that although it has no direct connection to Hitchcock, _Charade_ is so clearly 100% inspired by Hitchcock that it should be considered part of the top ten.”

Veronica frowned. “That seems like it’s stretching the rules a bit.”

Ravi held up a hand. “Two words: Audrey Hepburn.”

* * *

A few hours and a whole lot of movie talk later, uniforms brought the two suspects into the station, and the one who hadn’t pulled the trigger flipped on the one who had as quick as a pancake on a hot stove. They’d followed Mickey from the motel, realizing that he must have taken pictures of them as well as Johnny, shot him, and stolen the camera. A waste of a good man, but at least we’d solved it, just a day after Veronica Mars’ arrival.

“The Case of the Contraband Cigarettes,” I said. 

She nodded. 

I walked with her to her rental car, quietly relieved that for once, the contraband hadn’t involved brains or Utopium. 

“Thanks for the help,” she said, getting into her car. “Mickey would have been impressed.”

“With you, too.”

She started the car, then rolled down the window and leaned out. “You know, Liv Moore, the only thing I believe in less than psychics is zombies…”

She paused, and I somehow felt myself turn even paler than usual.

“But I believe in you, whatever your deal is. Keep fighting the good fight.”

“And don’t let the bastards get you down?”

“Exactly.” And with that, she was gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies for not finding larger roles for Blaine and Ravi, but Veronica and her case kind of took up a lot of space. Hope this satisfies your iZombie/VMars crossover urge!


End file.
